Reports of the death of technology start-ups are greatly exaggerated

While cities across Europe vie to attract the technology start-ups that will grow big and generate profits on the scale of Apple or Facebook, there is growing angst in Silicon Valley itself that the golden age of the start-up is already over.

The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce and Airbnb, while the subsequent smartphone boom of 2007-16 gave rise to Uber, Lyft, Snap, Whatsapp, Instagram and Twitter. These are unlikely to be followed any time soon by a revolution involving new players, according to Techcrunch, the influential technology industry publisher.

Jon Evans, its columnist, believes that today’s new technologies are so complicated and expensive that only the handful of tech giants that have already occupied and colonised the web can…